Unknown futures

April 28, 2008

In R&D’s 50th year of publication, it’s appropriate that we look back on occasion to see what’s changed. Looking back just 25 years to the April 1983 issue of Industrial Research & Development, we find a number of articles and news items similar to topics that we currently cover. This includes materials science, instrumentation, control systems, software, photonics (in the form of lasers and fiber optics), and vacuum technology.

If you look for some coverage in that issue of today’s hot topics, like energy research, sustainability, or environmental topics, you won’t find any at all. They weren’t of great importance at that time, although a reasonable amount of research was being performed. Surprisingly, research-based 32-bit desktop computers were already available, but running on Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, or Basic II—Windows 1.0 was introduced in 1985, and wasn’t widely accepted until 3.1 was introduced in 1992.

There also isn’t any mention of the Internet, wireless, or any networking systems. ARPANET was still being explored in university environments and the NSF developed CSNET based on TCP/IP in 1983.

What this tells me is that in the near future, some technologies will remain somewhat relevant, while some focus areas may be beyond the reach of our forecasting abilities. The world is a rapidly changing environment, much more so than it was in 1984. Energy, food, globalization, and bionanotechnologies will have a much greater impact on our future than they did in 1983—in 1983 they weren’t even mentioned. In editorial surveys, our readers say that technology is self-fulfilling and that future changes will occur in faster cycles.

Those same surveys and others indicate that our need for energy will increase over the next 25 years—in the U.S. by more than 50%, and in other developing countries by an even larger rate. The population is expected to grow from 6.8 billion to 9.3 billion and then there’s always the potentially changing climate. So we certainly have challenges ahead of us. Some of those challenges will be met by the evolution of existing technologies and some are likely to be met by technologies we don’t even know about yet.

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